Faculty of Arts appoints three new Chairs

Professor Shane Butler

Professor Katharine Ellis

Professor Simon Shaw-Miller

Press release issued:
25 January 2013

The Faculty of Arts at the University of Bristol has appointed three new Chairs: Professor Shane Butler (Chair in Latin Language and Literature), Professor Katharine Ellis (Stanley Hugh Badock Chair in Music) and Professor Simon Shaw-Miller (Chair in History of Art).

Professor Shane Butler, Chair in Latin Language and Literature, comes to Bristol from UCLA's Department of Classics. His primary research interests lie in the history and theory of media, including but not limited to the history of the book. His current work is on efforts to record the voice in antiquity, the subject of his forthcoming book The Ancient Phonograph. He is co-editor of a new series from Cambridge University Press on classical reception called Classics After Antiquity and is also Associate Editor of the I Tatti Renaissance Library.

Professor Katharine Ellis, Stanley Hugh Badock Chair in Music, comes to Bristol from Royal Holloway, University of London. She is a cultural historian of music in nineteenth-century France. In her research, she seeks to explain what different kinds of music meant to those who experienced them, used them and avoided them, and to probe how music and musicians operated in light of cultural, social and regulatory frameworks. Books in press embrace music and words, and the politics of plainchant revival. Current projects include a book on musical life in regional France 1848-1814, and a cultural history of music in nineteenth-century Paris.

Professor Simon Shaw-Miller, Chair in History of Art, comes to Bristol from Birkbeck, University of London where he was Professor of History of Art & Music. His research interests are the history of art and music in the modern period (1800-1960s). He is concerned with questions of interdisciplinary methodology, modernism, the concepts of visual music, musical iconography, synaesthesia, musical ekphrasis, and the aesthetics of the Gesamtkunstwerk. He is an Honorary Associate and Research Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music. His most recent book, due later this year, is entitled Eye hEar: The Visual in Music.